WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1355 - Sam Quinones

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Journalist Sam Quinones blew Marc’s mind six years ago with his book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. More recently, he devoted his research and reporting to understanding how America got caught in the clutches of newer, more addictive, and more lethal synthetic drugs. Sam’s latest book is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. Sam talks with Marc about how these drugs work over the brain, how they’re getting into the country, and how they have exacerbated America’s homelessness crisis. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's winter, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No. But moose head? Yes. Because that's alcohol, and we deliver that too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing.

With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuck stirs i say that twice what's happening how's it going where are we at are you good let me ask you a question let me and i'm gonna i'm

gonna maybe i've discussed this before but i'm gonna put it right to you are you having negative thoughts about yourself other people or the world are you feeling hopelessness about the future do you have memory problems including not remembering important aspects of events in your life, like yesterday. Difficulty maintaining close relationships. Are you feeling detached from family and friends? Do you have lack of interest in activities you once enjoyed? Do you have difficulty experiencing positive emotions? Are you feeling emotionally numb?

I'm just asking these in a general way. I'm just checking in because these are the symptoms of PTSD. Welcome. How are you? You know where you get PTSD? From looking at your phone too much. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But, you know, I mean, seriously, seriously.

How many of those feelings do you have? It blows me away. I think I talked about this before, but I'm talking about it again because we've got a heavy episode ahead of us. You know, and here's some other ones. Obviously, you know, PTSD is real, but it's my contention that post pandemic or whatever part of the pandemic we're in, the trickling pandemic, the ongoing sort of mild version of the pandemic post and ongoing you know trump problems and very real threats of fascism and climate disaster every day and you just see this and the fact that you want to ignore it out of powerlessness that's a symptom i mean i'm just

taking care of me you mean you can't handle what's happening well who can jesus christ can i just have a nice sandwich being easily startled or frightened hey always being on guard for danger what what what's that self-destructive behavior such as drinking too much or living too fast or you know masturbating for seven hours to porn it's not terrible but it's not a great way to spend a day or eating eating eating trouble sweeping trouble concentrating trouble concentrating trouble sweeping trouble concentrating what irritability angry outbursts or aggressive behavior go fuck yourself connie overwhelming guilt or shame i'm sorry i said that jesus i'm sorry oh my god i feel terrible i don't i don't so look today on the show i'm talking to uh

sam kinyonis okay he's a journalist and in 2016 he was on to talk about his book, Dreamland, True Tales of America's Opiate Epidemic. You can actually go back and listen to that talk now. It's available for free on all podcast apps now. Scroll down to episode 757 from November of 2016. So I had him back. He wasn't pitched. It didn't have to happen, but I read the new book called The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.

And I had him back on. I just needed to talk to him because there were revelations in that book that reframed the way that I looked at some of the cultural problems we're having. that some of the cultural problems we're having that have to do with the unhoused. Or if you want to be belligerent and are unwilling to change the homeless. If making the leap to unhoused is too much for you, you just sort of like, why does everything have to change? You're not different way oh again they're fucking homeless no what the fuck is wrong with people listen a few weeks ago we had michael man on the show great talk uh if you haven't heard it uh you can check it out anytime you want right there in the podcast feed. Michael Mann. The episode date is

July 18th. We talked a bit about his new novel, Heat 2, and it comes out tomorrow. So just to give you a little reminder about that, here's a clip of me and Michael Mann talking about Heat 2. The novel begins one day after the end of the movie. Okay.

And Chris Scherholz is wounded. He's the last survivor. He's half delirious on drugs. Yeah. Nate, John Voight's trying to get him out. And he becomes aware that Charlene betrayed him and that Neil's dead. Yeah. And he's got to get out of L.A.

Neil's dead. Yeah. And he's got to get out of L.A. And then it jumps back to 1988 when Neil's alive, obviously, and the Val Kilmer character and that whole crew are going to burglarize a bank vault at night. Hannah happens to be a cop in a quasi-corrupt Chicago police department chasing a home invader. And so all these stories begin in 88. Yeah. moves back it didn't move from there it takes some things that happen in mexicali so it sounds almost like that this was you you couldn't do it the same way in a movie this is a book but it's

also going to be a very large movie it's going to be oh yeah okay is that 30 underway uh yes that's exciting i can't talk about it but yes okay because i was wondering if it was it was in in place of uh no it's it's i always want i always wanted to do this book yeah i always wanted to to uh explore the early life of these guys yeah and then And then also to project, to find a way to bring the past into the present and the present being about 2002, seven years after the events of Heat, the movie. So how do you cast that if you're going to do a film?

Very, very large ways. Yeah. Yeah. You got to listen to that whole thing. It's fucking awesome. You can get Heat 2 tomorrow in stores or whatever online seller you use to get books. Can you dig it? Can you dig it?

Listen to that little Chachi. I'm sorry. What's he doing? I don't know. I shouldn't have brought him in. It was my bad. No, it's okay. Don't freak out.

Come here. Come here, Chachi. What's the matter, Jimmy? What's the matter, Timmy? What? What? Uh-huh. What else? Yeah? Are you a Charlie? Yeah? How about Charlie? I like Charlie. You like Charlie? How's Charlie? What do you think? Charlie? Huh? Okay. Go back in the hat. Do you want me to take him away now? Yeah. I'll be in a second. Okay. I'm sorry. I think I'm going to keep that kitten. Doesn't it sound like I'm going to keep that kitten? I'm in trouble. in trouble so strap in this is a heavy honest conversation with a journalist who wrote two great books and just it's important information to know what's really going on you know why what causes um the profound addiction to fentanyl and meth and what are

these new drugs these synthetic drugs how do they piggyback on the on the uh opioid crisis and the black tar heroin crisis what has happened uh both for horrible for bad, and also for some sort of kind of bits of light? How do you track it all back? How do you make it an exciting narrative so people learn? What it showed me about the current unhoused situation, especially since people make so much fun of the unhoused you know just relentlessly bullying it's the the purest punching down and not you look i've done it myself but i'm aware i'm aware but there's information that you will hear about fentanyl about methamphetamine that's going to make you look at your family differently it's going to make you look at the culture differently it's going to make you look at your family differently. It's going to make you look at the culture differently. It's going to make you look at the problem we're up against

differently. And it's certainly going to make you look at the desperate people in the streets of your city differently. And it's going to make you wonder, how can you help if you're that kind of person? Or it's going to put you further into some sort of PTSD. But Sam is a top-notch journalist. It's all in this new book, The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. It's available now wherever you get books, and it comes out in paperback November 1st.

This is me talking to Sam Quinones. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats, get almost, almost anything. Order now.

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When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, A new original series, streaming February 27th, exclusively on Disney+. 18+. Subscription required. Teas and sees apply. So, not unlike the last book, Sam, I guess I'm, I don't know if I'm late to the party, but it's been out for a little while, right? Nine months.

That's not much. Takes me a while to read things. Yeah, of course. Oh, yeah. But not unlike the last one, I read this and there's elements of it that were you know mind-blowing on on a lot of levels but something specifically that really grabbed me uh that that will get to but like before i i try to unfold it because like i don't always do you know conversations like this which i i think on some level work as a as a public service announcement, as some guy who's sober a long time. It's interesting, not unlike Dreamland, the true tales of America's opiate epidemic,

you land in a place that is relatively hopeful, somewhat, I wouldn't say optimistic, but a call to action that requires a community and patience and empathy. Sure. You know, and I think what's interesting about both of these books is that you don't, like, I finished it this morning. And I thought, like, well, I better finish it before it comes in. It's not like there's a spoiler. It's not like you're going to get here and I'm going to be like, does everything work out at the end? Right, right end right right right

but i guess in approaching this one i have to assume that uh the least of us true tales of america and hope in the time of fentanyl and meth was this after you finished dreamland yeah you must you must have seen this happening already well what happened was with dreamland yeah something happened that i could never have predicted. In fact, even by the last time we spoke, it really was not happening as much as it later did. This is what the fentanyl thing is. The awareness began to grow of this opioid epidemic. Right. And it was not there when I wrote it.

When I wrote Dreamland, it was like an echo chamber. No one was talking about this. And I began to get, after Dreamland comes out, I began to get all these invitations come speak. It was unbelievable, the numbers. And every year was more. And so 2016, it was like, the last time we spoke was like, yeah, some. And then 2017 and 18 and 19.

And then with COVID, it all kind of went away. But what happened was I began to see this, the meth and the fentanyl developing in real time as I was traveling. Everywhere I would go, they would go. Some places, I remember they started saying, we don't really even have any heroin anymore. It's all fentanyl. Nobody's got heroin for sale. So when you go to speak, like, okay, so, you know, you'd written a few books before Dreamland. Now, Dreamland obviously, you know, gave names and a face and a history and a structure to our drug problem that, I mean, deepened it. I imagine for anybody who read the book and for families and, you know, that there was a broader place to put the blame and also a systemic.

And a bigger story. They think the Dreamland kind of tied all these threads right uh together now when you get asked to speak i mean as a journalist you know what are you feeling do you feel like you're some sort of emissary yeah so a few things it depends who yes right that's a kind of sure that's a big part of it i also felt as time went on i didn't realize it when i first started doing it i began meeting people in every speech i gave and this could be conferences professional conferences judges public health whatever addiction counselors but also a lot of small towns i was hugging people like almost every speech because the truth is people come up with

to me with almost every speech two or three at it at every speech would be like yeah my my brother died yeah my dad died my kids died okay and um you try to say something that means something to people who are in that kind of grief um and the truth is, after a while, I mean, I would say things to them, but basically I just hug them. Because as time went on, I began to realize this was grief that was shared all across the country, and I needed to have some response. I realized that this wasn't coming upon me,

and have some response. And I began to understand that, you know, I would hold their hand. Sometimes you just got to stand there. Yes, right. Witness. Exactly, precisely. and i began to think and also i began to tell stories that i thought made them understand or allowed them to understand they weren't alone that this was uh too often this problem festered and spread because people believed they were just, there wasn't anybody in a 10-mile radius of me that has this problem. My kid, my husband, my wife, whatever, is addicted to this crap. And shame, right?

And also the shame. And nobody wanted to talk about it. was it was so um had spread so completely in my opinion was that the people who could best tell the stories about it where the families were ashamed were embarrassed don't you mean the the to tell the stories of personal uh crisis as a journalist and you have this kind of thing the the most personal stories the most impactful and if you don't have those people yeah you you're missing a gaping there's a big gaping hole and and as a result politicians really weren't paying attention to it um uh the media was covering a kind of scattershot not some places were doing a good job the opioids

this was the opioid epidemic but then along the way after dreamland comes out i began to do these these speeches and i began to see as i travel the country, I did, in four and a half years, I did 265 speeches. It was just insane. And you're going to these places that were profoundly affected, which is almost everywhere, by the opioid epidemic, and people wanted at least some window, some hope, some explanation. Exactly. People wanted at least some window, some hope, some explanation. Exactly. And I think the more you tell a story, the stories are, in my opinion, the best way of, first of all, breaking down the shame.

The human stories. Putting the human face on the crisis. And how they fit. How their boy or how their wife or whatever fits into this larger thing. So that's the way you present it? So they can kind of have some sense to it. So that's how you presented it when you i think so yeah and it became a very very cathartic thing for me every time i spoke it did not get old i gave i gave similar speeches frequently sure um and it was very very powerful i'm saying that not out of uh immodesty but i mean most of the time i was getting standing

ovations it was like a very powerful thing. And then afterwards, I would sign books and meet people. And people would come up, you know, hugging. It's service. Yeah. Yeah. It was that. And I began to realize that the awareness now was spreading across the country. That people were now aware that this was a national problem.

They were not all alone. It was not every, you know not one person every 10 miles. So not unlike Dreamland, where you kind of followed a lead that opened up this entire world to you, which was Blacktar heroin arrests in Appalachia, right? Yeah, right. And so now you're out on the road.

And now I have to assume that on some level you know in in getting into the new book you have the the sort of context you have the infrastructure of this book and also connections that i didn't have before and but you have a specific approach to to how you're going to tell these stories because you're not only the personal stories go all the way up the ladder, the corporate ladder, the criminal ladder, drug dealers, whatever. But so what sparks it? I mean, you're just hearing about that now. At first, what I really wanted to do was, and this was initially like 2000, my publisher was saying, you got to do another book.

And I was like, okay, I'll try to figure out what it is. do another book and I was like oh okay I'll figure try to figure out what it is as Tom initially what I really wanted to do was write the half of the book that talks about the stories of community repair that's a recovery bird in in Muncie Indiana yeah um and that's in this book in this book yeah and so I began to do these stories of people involved in community repair not necessarily helping addicts but just finding ways of bringing people together sustaining a community that was in stress in some way and i began to develop these stories and then along the way i began to realize holy shit fentanyl is taking over everything and that was first in the Midwest. And then it goes east and west after that. It goes later too.

You were hyper attuned to the deaths? Yes. But also people would, like I would meet at, you know, narcotics agents and people who were in ER docs. These are the guys you knew from the first book? No. Well, sometimes, but mostly it would be people I would just meet on the way.

Really? I'd sit them down for, like, sometimes it'd be as short as five minutes. What's going on in your area? Were you recording? Not initially. It was more like, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. And I began to realize that the fentanyl story, which began very small and I thought was going to be inconsequential, turns out to be the story, and it begins to crowd out heroin. When did you think it was small and inconsequential turns out to be the the story and it begins to crowd out heroin when did you think it was small and inconsequential uh 2000 when i was writing dreamland i thought

okay you heard of it was my brain was but you heard about fentanyl oh i had heard about it sure yeah but i just thought okay i don't have any more room in my little brain or my book to put in fentanyl right so i'm gonna leave that for another time if I have to cover it at all. And then as I hit the road and as I began to speak more often, I began to see, oh, shit, man, this is really taking over everything. And it's crowding. So there's no more heroin in these areas. After a while, it takes about a year, and pretty soon it's just all fentanyl. So what did that tell you?

Did that tell you that somehow the people that were involved in the franchising of heroin had to be involved no no the opposite that that there was now such an enormous market that had gone way beyond the the the small time groups that i was writing about in dreamland and now it was like a global market almost so so your question at that point was, where the fuck is this coming from? Yeah, and at first, the answer was in small packages from Chinese chemical companies. That people could get on the black net. Yeah, and on the dark web and all that stuff. Yeah, whatever you call it.

Right, yeah. That's what it's called. And they would get it, and it would come to dealers. These guys were viewing fentanyl as their lottery ticket. Oh, my God. I get like a quarter pound of fentanyl. I make millions.

That's what they were thinking. So it was decentralized completely. Completely. In Dreamland, it was decentralized, but still active. There were people in control in Mexico. There was an organic foundation. It had to be grown and then it had to be distributed and there was a a business model in place so what's interesting about the fentanyl thing is like any idiot could get a brick of fentanyl with not knowing what they had you know chop it like not know how to mix it right

and cut it like it's coke and kill people yes Yes. And that's what began to happen because this was a lottery ticket. Yes. The problem was, for a lot of these cats on the street, that lottery ticket was connected to the idea that they now had to mix it. The first time in the history of drug use in America where you have widespread drug that you, but you can't just sell it. You got to mix it. It's way too pure.

And it's a few little grains of salt worth of fentanyl will get you high. A couple more will kill you. But you can't, either way, you can't sell that stuff. You got to sell it. You can't sell a few grains. So you have to mix it. And that's where you began to see the magic bullet blender being used in these idiots like basements.

magic bullet blender being used in these idiots like basements. And you go through very, you spend time in the book with proper chemical breakdown and also proper ways to sort of what it would take to mix this properly. And these folks on the street don't have a clue. And that's why you began to see, particularly in the first states that were affected, which were all the opioid states, like the West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, places like that, you began to see clusters of overdoses, like 70 in a weekend in, I think, Cincinnati. Well, a lot of them were deaths, but then there's also a lot of people who revived because there's a lot of Narcan, the opioid overdose antidote. And so what you begin to see is these guys mixing it really, really badly because they don't know what they're doing, nor do they probably care.

And when the narcs would bust their houses, they'd find five, six magic bullet blenders, all cruddy and dusty. But that was because you had guys at the lowest end thinking they'd won the lottery. Mixing this stuff in this way that they'd heard was the best way. And I think the reason they, they thought it was a great way to do is because I think earlier on heroin had kind of been mixed that way too. Coke. To some, maybe, maybe. Some kind of grinder. but mostly i think it

had to do with the fact that it had that bubble the magic bullet is a plastic bubble you know and so the idea was now you don't have to breathe the fumes you know because it's on a little of course the problem is the magic bullet blender doesn't have is is not the way you mix powder it's it's for liquids it's for smoothies and also it's like not that small you mix powder. It's for liquids. It's for smoothies. And also, it's like not that small. You're dealing with something highly lethal, and it takes so little. So little to kill people. When I was reading that stuff, it was just horrifying.

Look, I've been sober, it's going to be, I don't know, 23 years, right, next month. And so this is all new to me, but just knowing that kids are out there, and this stuff is in everything now. See, this is all new to me. Yeah. But just knowing that kids are out there and this stuff is in everything now. See, this is what happened. They put it in Coke, they put it in Speed, they put it in everything. Yeah. And one line, you're dead, man.

Yeah. And that's so we've reached, like in our lifetimes, the emergence of the era of recreational drug use and the end now of risk-free recreation like so like somebody just offers you a line at a party yeah and you can't take it you better test it you've had you better test it and and you better test the whole line because this part if it doesn't have fentanyl the next the next half of the line might have fentanyl so so and and and and the pills now the the other what began to happen with fentanyl is that that the mexicans finally figured out how to make it they had a few couple chapters on the book this one underground chemist kind of introduces a so i love that so that whole part of it is like you know this the the way you kind of build things in this book how when you're

set out to construct a book because it was the same in Dreamland, where you're integrating, you know, things that will give context, things that will show the hierarchy of things, but also things like, I mean, you spend a lot of time, you know, talking about brain chemistry. Yes. And was this something from, like, when you finished dreamland and had time to reflect on it were there things in this book where you're like i gotta explain that now yes and it should have been in dreamland i just didn't have my brain is very limited and i didn't have space to put in the neurochemistry and the the the uh the neuroscience of it all and i thought but it's even advanced since then though yes sure sure sure but to me, the beauty, the great joy that I get from journalism is that I get to not write about stuff I know about, but rather find out about stuff I don't know anything about. So you're excited about it.

Oh, hell yeah. And I was very lucky in some of these cases, for example, with the neuroscience to be able to talk to some brilliant, brilliant. We are in the golden age in neuroscience research right now. They were learning so much. So what was the thing, the one thing out of all that that you were like, holy shit, this is a key? Oh, man. I mean, they're all. I guess the most amazing thing, the thing that I would repeat to my wife yeah was um you know they had that that one

experiment on rats uh-huh uh where they would you know naloxone is a drug that you give to opioid uh people who are in over opioid over an overdose yeah to revive them and they immediately frequently they go into withdrawals when you revive them because they're all of a sudden they have had all their dope deprived oh they're taken away from their brain chemistry, their brain receptors. And they're mad because all of a sudden they're frustrated or whatever. Well, Princeton Neuroscience Lab did this experiment where it addicted. It got dependent on sugar, a whole cage of rats. And so all these rats needed sugar.

They would hit the sugar water constantly. They would never touch the non-sugar water at all. You know, bam, bam, bam. And then they gave the rats naloxone. Yeah. Like you would to a heroin overdose or a fentanyl overdose. And all of a sudden these rats start displaying symptoms of withdrawals that the neuroscientists associate with in a rat with withdrawals. A lot of shaking, a lot of grooming and fidgeting and all that kind of stuff.

And see, that was early on made me think like, damn, so we have all these things that are hitting our brains, not just heroin. Right. Sugar, all this stuff. Your phone. The phone could go on and on about that too. And it's all hitting our brains in the same way heroin is maybe not as powerfully and within such intensity,

and certainly not with the intensity of fentanyl, but nevertheless, it's hitting the same receptors. The dopamine? It's creating that kind of response in us to crave, and that's why- Is it the dopamine receptors? Yes, exactly. The opioid receptors that then generate dopamine

and you want, oh, that's good. Keep doing that. Keep doing that. Keep doing that. Right. And you explain in the book too that the serotonin is the balance. Serotonin is kind of satisfaction.

And dopamine is, I want more. So you have normally in our bodies, we have a little bit of maybe a tug of war of these two chemicals in our brains. A healthy life is when serotonin and dopamine are more or less balanced. Right. An addicted life is when the dopamine is really dominant. Right. And that could be by virtue of addiction or self-medicating a pre-existing problem.

But you don't find that out if you're strung out on dope. But so those experiments, because I thought that was interesting and kind of run throughout the book, is that once that was sort of discovered, you realize that the entirety of our late stage capitalistic culture is fueled primarily on keeping people in this fucking dopamine state of like hitting those receptors constantly. We have now we have 63. So when I was, I was in my high school, I was in the seventies. You know,

we had nothing like this in the eighties. Even we had nothing like this where you have all these, not just the illegal products, but now many, many legal products that very smart very moneyed corporations you talk about like the sugar construction of snacks right exactly like they're completely chicken nuggets chicken nuggets are are uh uh we're invented in a lab cornell university by the way not it's not like a recipe that some

some lady comes up with there's a place in those farm or somewhere it's not like a recipe that some lady comes up with or there's a place on those farm or somewhere. And so they are 60% fat and salt, which our brains evolved for millenniums, eons to crave because we got very little of it. And then you combine that with the dip that's got sugar in it, right? So you dip, that's the trifecta that's sugar fat and salt all in one thing and then but the chicken nugget i often use it's like it's very much like crack yeah right sure well what is crack well with cocaine coca leaf you chew the coca leaf

and it gets you mildly buzzed yeah right yeah now you you process it you strip away all those fibers that slow the absorption in the brain and you come up with the cocaine. Yeah. And all of a sudden, bam, you're hit. Yeah. Okay? Yeah.

And then they figured out, hey, if you cook cocaine or bake cocaine in a microwave with baking soda and water, it gets hard. You could smoke it and then boom, it gets. Yeah, yeah. So it's really stripping away all those things that prevent the quick absorption into your brain of the cocaine. And that's what chicken nuggets are. Chicken nuggets are kind of like we're stripping away a lot of the nutrition, all the stuff that stops that. And obviously, it's not exactly like crack.

The effect is very different. But the idea is you strip away the nutrition. You strip away the stuff that slows things down, and sugar's the same way. You're probably not going to lose your house strung out on nuggets. No, no, strung out on chicken nuggets, it's unlikely. But I think what you're talking about, and I think you hint at it throughout the book, if not explicitly, but certainly subtly, is that almost all of our culture is operating at this frequency. That's where I was going.

We have transformed in the last, I would say last 20, certainly last 30 years, into mass marketing of highly addictive legal shit. Phones. But even discourse, dude. Even semantics.

Even on the phone. I mean, you spend 10 minutes on your phone in the morning, you blow your brains out, dude. even semantics, even on the phone. I mean, you spend 10 minutes on your phone in the morning. You blow your brains out, dude. You blow your fucking brains out on clickbait, on TikTok, on Instagram. It's just this. My wife had a very interesting thing to say about this. She's my best editor.

And she said, you know, it used to be that we had to had to work hard to develop an opinion. You have to read people who know more than you about topic X. And many people, you have to really work hard. Now, opinions are like fast food. We're getting force-fed them on Twitter, on Instagram. Whatever feels good. Memes. Yeah, whatever feels good.

Exactly. And pretty soon, you don't have to work anymore. You just adopt it. Well, yeah, but you should still work. But there was an interest. I think there was a sentence in there that I may have underlined towards the end about the nature of that specifically. Because you bring up QAnon and tribalism. You bring up the idea that social media was supposed to create this great community, but instead it created virulent tribalism. Remember the Egypt Spring and all that? It was supposed to be this community forum through which-

Right, right, right here. Remember when social media was going to be great technological connective tissue, bringing people together, inaugurating a new era of understanding? Instead, it midwifed an era of virulent tribalism. The opioid epidemic began with legal drugs, irresponsibly marketed and prescribed. Yes. But yes. So it's like this is because I've been talking about on stage a little bit, but not with that kind of clarity is that, you know, we're now learning just how soft the brain is and how much you need to be vigilant about what you let in there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And how much, frankly, it seems to me one of um uh i had a heart attack five years ago and uh and

since i've been um doing a lot more exercise and that kind of thing and and how much uh and i think for addiction recovery this is extraordinarily important as well how much nutrition and exercise they are the best medicine rather more than pills more than whatever else right well that you talk about that towards the end of the book too about, about how people have grown to rely on, what do I got to take to fix this? Yeah. I think that's kind of the problem that grew up since the 60s, basically.

I think that's the birth of Big Pharma, really. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also then Big Pharma understands that, understands that we prize convenience, understands our lives are sedentary and very fast moving. And they begin to market to that.

Right. So alongside of talking about the neuroscience, you're talking about the history of synthetic painkillers. Yeah, right. And obviously, if you want to talk, if people who are listening want to really get into the opioids, you can read the other book, but you put enough of it in here to get the hang of it. But the nature of some of those,

that was even higher science than the fentanyl and everything else. And that once these recipes, I mean, who's the guy you track it to, that one guy who invented fentanyl? Paul Johnson. Right, they started to fuck with the molecules just to see what else they could come up with. And there's a lot of ways to synthesize this powerful painkiller or ones like it. Ones like it.

Yeah. Paul Janssen is an interesting guy because, I mean, he's been dead a good number of years now, but I mean, he was really a brilliant, brilliant scientist. One of the great scientists of the 20th century. And fentanyl, he invented understanding what it would do, completely understanding that it would hit the brain much quicker. Yeah. It would be great for anesthesia. And it brings you in because it brings you in and out very quickly.

So before that, it was morphine. They'd always have to take you down to death. Right. And it's very dangerous. And fentanyl is in and out. And frankly, most of the people listening to this, many of the people listening to this will have had fentanyl in an operation. It's a magnificent drug. It revolutionized surgery.

And in the hands of an anesthesiologist and a surgeon, it is fantastic. And they gave it to me when I was having my heart attack surgery. But that was the idea, that it takes you in and out. Very quick entry through the brain to the brain. And then very easy to get it out of there as well with naloxone. And so it really transforms surgery. The problem is, of course, it's extraordinarily potent. That's part of its value as a real drug in a surgical setting.

Yeah. And in the hands of the wrong people. And in the hands of the wrong people, you know, so they begin to figure out that, you know, early on for several decades in fentanyl's life, you get these really kind of rogue chemists off and one-off types, you know. Yeah. Like he made, you know, three pounds of fentanyl. Yeah. And people start dying. Yeah. And then they disappear.

You never knew who really did it. So these guys were sort of challenging themselves to see if they could do it. Yeah, and some of them were like kind of anti-government types. And then, but the big thing that really happened was in 2006 when one underground chemist, Ricardo Valdez Torres, talk about him in the book, is hired by the Sinaloa drug cartel. He's from Mexico, but he's lived most of his life in San Diego and learned how to cook it there and cook fentanyl. But

they hire him to cook, make ephedrine because ephedrine is the precursor to one of the most important ways of making methamphetamine. The old style. Old school. Yeah, yeah, right. And they are thinking that we're going to run out of ephedrine if we don't watch it. Government's cracking down. Oh, because they were getting it from China. They were getting it from the,

the, the, all variety of places. But there was being curtailed by the Mexican government. And so, they hired this guy. Because of the speed. Yeah, they want to make,

they want to make meth. Exactly right. And they, and, and, and they say, we want you to make meth. But he, like, very ballsy,sy, says to himself, yeah, okay, they don't know what they're talking about. I'm going to make fentanyl because that's what I really want to make.

And they get mad. But he sits them down and says, look, man, you don't know what you're talking about. This is the most powerful, profitable drug you will ever see. This will take a 50 to one cut. And they don't believe that because on the street, you don't cut anything 50 times and have it worth selling. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. But sure enough, you could do it with the shit that he's, he's selling. They begin. So there's wire taps of, of him, of, of these guys selling it up in Chicago and up in Detroit. Oh my. And call them back down to Mexico. Oh my God, it's working.

You know, people love it. Like that kind of thing. And, and, but down to Mexico, oh my God, it's working, you know, people love it, like that kind of stuff. But that's the first time you see mass death associated with- 2007? 2006 and, right, exactly. He's busted in 2006, but he had just sold 10 kilos into the market,

and so that has to spend many months killing people, and it really heads to, you know, it's like Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, places like that. Is this where it starts to replace the opioids? No, it's where this, but it is where the Sinaloa drug cartel, the light goes on. That there is now a synthetic form of heroin. We don't have to wait for poppies. We don't have to grow poppies and hire farmers to make it for us. You could just make it in a lab. Oh my God. And then he's arrested. He spends

15 years in prison and stuff like that. He's not accessible to them. But meanwhile, the Chinese begin to figure this out and figure out that, hey, there's all these opioid addicts in America, but also elsewhere in the world. They begin to sell it. And so you begin to see these two forces, the Mexicans and the Chinese chemical company, the Mexican cartel groups and the Chinese chemical companies kind of separately, but then more like connected. And alongside of this, the methamphetamine business is also shifting. Well, the meth business out of Mexico, yes. Right, exactly. Except for the meth business was well-known and well-practiced down in Mexico. They had industrialized the methamphetamine

made with this chemical known as ephedrine, which you find in Sudafed pills and all that stuff. They knew how to make that. It's very, very easy to make meth with that. Yeah. But then the Mexican government, as I said, begins to crack down out of pressure global pressure united states and there's some political considerations

internally and all that kind of but what ends up happening is they really reduce significantly the importations of ephedrine so the traffickers have been 20 years doing this or well yeah about 20 years doing it by then and they're like all of sudden, we don't have our main chemical. What do we do? And so they shift to this other form of making methamphetamine that is old but new to them. The P2P meth. P2P stuff. But at Old Howell,

was that the original way the bikers made it? Yes, and you've got this poster of Gimme Shelter, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, which I've seen a couple of times. I'm a big Rolling Stones fan. Yeah. That is really, at that concert, is really where you see the first expression in American culture of P2P methamphetamine on those bikers.

Yeah. Those bikers, you watch, you remember, they're going through with their Harleys and beating up people because they're touching their bikes in the middle of a crowd of 100,000 or whatever. And up front, it's bedlam. I remember watching that movie when I was in high school and then many years later. And what I didn't understand, what I now understand, was this was the first time you really saw in public on film and all that P2P method at work. See, this was the thing I was talking about at the beginning

that really sort of made me feel like we needed to talk about it specifically in relation to, you know, the the current homeless situation is that, you know, because I'm a guy, you know, OK, COVID happened and the economy took a hit. But I'm driving around and you see these these this homeless situation, the tents and the shanty towns and whatever. And you see the the weird hoarding of artifacts. the weird hoarding of artifacts. But my brain still bends around this sort of 80s sense of like, well, these were, you know, when Reagan, you know, shut down, put all the mentally ill on the streets, you know, you had this problem of these poor, tragic people that couldn't get help. And it was terrible.

And so my brain and mindset, not just it was around class and around mental illness, but what your book, you know, posits and I and I think you support it well, is that, you know, this new way of making meth is them to make methamphetamine in many different ways. You can make P2P. It's known as phenyl 2-propanone as the precursor chemical. You can make it in many different ways. So if the government cracks down on these three chemicals, you need to make P2P. You shift over here to these other chemicals. What are the ones that you have to have?

Well, no, there's no. Really? You can make it with many different combinations, like 15 or 20, maybe even more than that. And they're all legal. They're all widely available chemicals used in a variety of industries. They're all toxic.

And so it makes it very difficult for the government to crack down as they did on ephedrine. And so now, if they crack down on one thing, you make it another way. And here's the crucial thing. The trafficking world by now controls major shipping ports on the western side of Mexico, Pacific coast of Mexico. What year is this?

This would be 2000. By the 90s, really, they control a lot of that stuff. But by the 2000s, for sure. Yeah. They've got... And now now without a doubt and so they're getting they get access to the entire world's chemical market so they can bring in this stuff in container loads that's you're saying that now now mexico can make tons

oh yeah i was on a conversation i was just uh reminded of this uh earlier today i've had a number of conversations with a man who is a uh who's used to um uh uh manage kind of a low mid-level manager of a meth operation for the sinaloa drug cartel in in down in mexico he's still down he's still in mexico speaks perfect english grew up here grew up in uh you know in artesia someplace and um and he said his operation alone this is just his group of workers and stuff was making five tons a month of and and and and and and doing the um and uh p2p yeah and laundering 15 to 20 million a month a dollar a month so initially that was my story initially i was like we have reached a period

where they have been able to cover the entire country, not just cover the entire United States, but at the same time, drop the price from that to the point where it's like 80 by 80%. So, and what evolves in the book is that didn't matter whatever drug you were on, why not do this one? Yes. And it begins to take over. So you begin to see people who are on opioids now switch to meth. Then along the way, as I'm about to finish the book, I have this conversation with this guy who I just saw earlier today. As a matter of fact, Eric Barrera, wonderful fellow. Yeah. Former meth user, former Marine who tells, and I meet him by chance and we, and he's now a homeless outreach worker.

And he's telling me in 2009, he said 2009, immediately my brain goes, yeah, because 2008 is when the Mexican government cracked down on ephedrine. 2009 is when this shift begins towards this other form of making methamphetamine. He tells me I've been using it for eight years and I was, it was like a euphoric drug. I was, as he said, the phrase always sticks in my mind. I was everybody's best friend. I was yakking away. On the old speed.

Yeah, exactly. And all of a sudden, I take it, and I turn into this raging, paranoid maniac, stabbing the walls because my girlfriend's got a man hidden on the wall or in the mattress, all that shit. And he says, for the next several years, when I was strung out on the stuff, I never felt the euphoria again. I was always kind of consumed with pornography. I'm consumed alone with my pornography, consumed with paranoia, all this kind of stuff. And this hit me right then. I'm like, holy shit.

Now, if this supply, this form of making methamphetamine yeah as i'm sure it is is now coast to coast right then maybe and these symptoms are what this guy maybe these symptoms are also coast to coast right and what ended up this was during the middle of the first pandemic year like to 2020 yeah summer 2020 yeah so i'm sitting there at a Pasadena pizzeria with this guy and he's explaining to me this major story that I had never considered. And and I begin to call. So I begin to say, I've got to check this somehow. So I begin to call all these people, ER folks, treatment folks many of them, frankly. And as I begin, I call all over the country, Southern Indiana, Portland, Albuquerque, Vegas, Skid Row, numerous police people down there. West Virginia, Virginia, et cetera, et cetera. I just call and call and call. And at every place I'm calling, they're telling me exactly the same story.

2009. Yeah. It was remarkable. I was like, holy. I was walking around. In fact, one of the first guys I called was a meth researcher I've known for a long time at the University of West Virginia. Now, he used to be out here in UCLA doing meth experiments. And I know he's got this long history of researching meth and all that. And he said,

man, I had never thought of it that way, but I bet you that's why. Because exactly what you're saying, well, exactly, here's what we're seeing. That I got here in 2016, this meth arrived in 2017 in West Virginia, hadn't been there before. And he says, almost immediately, you find people descending into very scary symptoms of schizophrenia, mental illness, paranoia, and then very quickly, homelessness, and then encampments and all that kind of stuff, too. And so once he told me that, I had Eric's story out here in Pasadena. And then this guy was Virginia, telling me the exact same story. Exactly when this thing starts showing up in large quantities, you begin to see this. And since then, I think, I mean, I was extraordinarily convinced from my reporting of this story when I published the book.

And since the book, I've done, people have come out of the woodwork, you know. I just spoke with a very high official in the county substance abuse official and he was telling it's it's clear the the meth is is very different and it's creating all these issues quickly and it's that's the thing it's not like you take three months to develop this stuff uh it's it's more like hours sometimes a few days so you know. And all of a sudden, everybody is a threat. Every black car that passes is an FBI agent after you. And every fire alarm attached in your apartment is the CIA bugging your, you know, that kind of thing. It's wild paranoia and very intense. So the thing that I think that blew my mind is that once the shift, once it became so cheap and the market was so glutted that any idiot could sell a pound and you could get it for a nickel.

Right, yeah. So all that was on the streets after the tar went away and after the opioid thing tapped out was fentanyl and this meth. So ultimately- Both synthetics. Yeah, both synthetics. No plant involved. Yeah, so there's no end to the supply. Right, exactly right.

And it's cheap. And it's made with impunity down in Mexico. Very important to understand that. The traffickers face no scrutiny from, almost no scrutiny from law enforcement. So the game of anybody who gets involved in this world, who gets strung out on, you know, even for a minute, I think the move of all drug addiction to these two primary substances you know that are usually done in tandem with each other or as a reaction to each other right that you know that that uh that people were doing the meth because they didn't want to od on

fentanyl yeah and then you know the fentanyl people were probably doing the the the uh the meth to kind of get a speedball thing going or or you use the meth because you're afraid of fentanyl, or you use the meth because you're now homeless, and this meth does an exceptionally fine job of divorcing you from reality, and so you're really not aware, or it keeps you up a lot, too. It even explains the hoarding. You see these encampments with just mountains of garbage. And bicycle parts everywhere, right? Yeah.

This is a remarkable thing but meth this meth in particular not the ephedrine meth so much but this method is really connected to um an obsessive behavior and one of the obsessions that people seem to have i first heard about this in west virginia not in la but um uh is is obsession with bicycles and bicycle parts and taking apart a bicycle, stealing bicycles right around late at night because you're up all night and you're out for days, you know. And then I begin driving around L.A. and I begin to realize, holy shit, I see bicycle parts, big bicycle, what they call bicycle stores,

like in Skid Row and stuff like that. Bicycles are huge. And what's amazing to me too, Mark, is this, I think. I've been doing this a long time. It used to be that with drugs you had regional stories. People would use this drug here and 500 miles away they wouldn't even know what that drug was. It was a real heterogeneous kind of drug mosaic all across the country. Right now what you're finding, this is a stunning development it feels to me,

is that the stories are all the same. You could talk to people in Reno, talk to people in southern Indiana, the story's going to be almost exactly the same. Fentanyl, meth, people dying of fentanyl, people out of their mind on meth, living in encampments. And also, both these these drugs you don't

see you don't see the effect of it so much in california and los angeles but you do in the midwest and both these drugs do an exceptionally fine job of convincing you that this is the only place you should be and so tent won't leave tent encampments even when the weather drops to like lethal temperatures people freeze to death rather than leave. And that's just an expression of the remarkable, powerful kind of brainwashing. Well, isn't that interesting, though, that this is happening with information as well? Yes. See, that's the thing.

You've got all this stuff that's out there now that is taking over our know our our our unprepared brain chemistry for a lot of people anyway it seems to me and and yeah you've got and you've got a lot of people who are very smart in corporations a lot of money a lot of research capability constantly tinkering yeah constantly tinkering with how do we make this a little bit better and then of course the marketing americans are nothing if not the greatest marketers in the history of the planet we know how to market that shit um you know why why do why do fast food places never change their logos because those logos are um are triggers yeah they're just as much a trigger as chopping up a line of cocaine and we hear that

chop chop chop, chop. All of a sudden you want to use it. Well, I mean, yeah. And also I think the, the sort of idea of impunity that you're very, you know,

sort of throughout this book, you know, because I think it happened after you wrote the last book was the, the, the, the sort of comeuppance for the Sackler family or, or, or for Purdue pharmaceuticals.

Right. But, but ultimately, you know, you characterize this family as treating it as a PR problem and not admitting to any responsibility for what they did. Yeah. And ultimately, that corporation, the corporate structure of that and how they sold pharmaceuticals. And you were clear later in the book to say they weren't the only ones, actually. There were others.

Oh, no, no. They weren't even the biggest ones by quite a bit. They were others for sure. But they sort of broke open the brains of everybody. And also, on the back of that, you got the new sort of heroin franchising model. But what's sort of disturbing about what's going on now, outside of people dying and outside of the mental health issues that happen almost immediately on the streets is, one, the lack of understanding,

and two, that there's no end, that the supply, that the idea, at least something used to be seasonal. At least you had to store something. You know what I mean? Right. There's no seasons. There's no seasons with synthetic drugs. You can make them in the middle of winter just as easily as in the middle of summer. And of course, if you control the supply of chemical ingredients, you can make them in quantities that we're seeing now. This is only possible, I think, because it's Mexico doing it. China had to, the chemical companies in China had to mail it through the mail. Pounds at a time.

You could never cover the entire country with not one but two of these extraordinarily powerful drugs with packs coming in from the mail. It's not logistically feasible. They may have wanted to do that, but they just can't do it.

With Mexico, it's a whole other thing. There's 2,000 miles of border, free trade. We don't have the capacity to check even. I don't know what the figure is, but it's a minuscule amount of the trucks coming over. People think of immigrants taking it over. Immigrant issues are a complicated one. But the truth is the drugs come in trucks yeah and you don't cover the entire country and drop the price by 80 percent by packing stuff around people's

waist and having them walk it across or walk it through the canyon or whatever that just doesn't happen i'm sorry it's it's a truck loads of shit at a time yeah and many many of these all day long all year long constantly because you're making too much for you know part of the story was it was a remarkable thing um i talked to this this gang member source i've had for a long time it's been wonderful guy really really great and um he told me i call him timmy in the book um uh he told me that he at one point started to he was using meth he got he was clean for a lot of years his life was going great and then some like an idiot starts using again begin begins to believe that he can be some major kingpin of trafficking meth goes down to

mexicali and there he hooks up he says the truth was you walk into any tire shop, any auto shop, any mechanics, and those are kind of notorious for being vectors of drug trafficking, certainly in Mexico, I think here too. But you've got just anybody you talk to within 10 minutes can put you in touch with 20 pounds of meth. But that's because the supplies, it was like store, there was just too much of the shit. Sure. They were making too much of it. Sure. And so after a while, he doesn't do very well of it. He gets out of it, long story.

But eventually, after a while, he's out of it, and they still keep calling him. Yeah. Because he's a white guy. Yeah. With a car registered in his own name. Yeah. And they've got, they're calling him, please come down to mexicali we'll fill your car you can take my because the the supply the point i'm making is the supplies sure we're just

staggering yeah and also uh it was it's interesting that you know in in uh in dreamland you know you really were focusing on appalachia and and and and broken or dead industrial towns like the rust belt and and all these uh the great industrial cities there's a lot of that in this book but what happens in this book when he especially when you talk about meth which was really uh specifically a white person's drug yeah is that eventually because of availability and because of persistence that it entered the black community entered the mexican community it was just you know everywhere when the Mexican community. It was just everywhere. When the Mexican traffickers got into meth,

that's when it began to consume the Latino here. You begin to see this in gangs, Latino gangs a lot, really bad. Gangs certainly don't need to be more psychotic. No, they don't, but they became so. And I've interviewed many guys who in the 90s, that really took over in early 2000s, absolutely, for sure. However, I could say that in 35 years as a reporter, a lot of those covering crime and issues related to that, I had never once, not once, seen a black person buy, use, sell, or even know what methamphetamine was. I mean, it just was, they were all about the drug users in the

African-American community were all about cocaine. That was their drug of choice. And so now all of a sudden comes this staggering supplies and relentless, not just one wave of it, but endless waves of this shit. And easy to get. Yeah, it's so easy to get. And all of a sudden you begin to see the black community start selling it. And that's why I wrote the story of Rashad Martin. That's a great story. Yeah. Who is now doing a lot of years for this, but became kind of the first black meth dealer in the Columbus, Ohio area. And very interesting fellow.

But I wanted to talk to him because I'm like, I've never seen this before. What happened? Well, I got out of prison, couldn't find work. You know, pretty soon someone holds up a baggie of this. I think it's crack at first because it's white powder. And then he go, and they go, no, this is meth. I go, I don't know what the fuck meth is. I never, he had never really even heard of it.

And pretty soon it just. I think you could smoke it, couldn't you? Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. But he never did drugs. Right. Nor did he ever.

He told me. I just thinking about the shift from crack to meth. Well, it just, what ends up happening with him is he begins to turn all his drug dealing buddies because he's been in prison,

just got out of prison for being part of this major crack ring. Right. And he begins to turn all those guys onto it and they begin to make more, as they said,

as they told him, he said, I made more money in a month than I made like a year selling crack, by selling methamphetamine. And he becomes like Mr. Kingpin. But also you go to talk about how they wanted to give back to the community. There was that sort of- The benefit to methamphetamine, if you want to call it that,

in the black community was that nobody did it at that time. Yeah. At that time. And so the money that was coming in wasn't being squandered on like crack, the way crack would. Right. You do it on crack. And so it was really about buying diapers, buying formula for babies, taking kids to the water park, that kind of thing. There was no drug use of meth yeah

up to that up to that point now i think that's changed but so now where are we at uh it's it's the meth is still there the crazy making meth and now the fentanyl is primarily uh it's everywhere no all of these pills yes because the trafficking world down on Mexico was making so much, and they could see that the dealers up here were idiots, didn't know how to mix it, didn't know what to do. And they began to say, why don't we- And they're killing people. They didn't want that, I'm assuming? Well, probably. I don't think they care so much about killing people.

They just want the headlines that go with killing people. But also, they began to see a value-added play in a sense if we sell it won't be kilos of fentanyl yeah boom that's okay that's something but if we turn those kilos into 200,000 pills a piece or whatever it happens i can't remember what the what the what the breakdown would be. And we could sell those pills, each of them for, you know, that's a big, so that's what begins to happen. 2017 is when you first begin to see those pills being produced, counterfeit, attempts to make counterfeit pharmaceutical pills. Right.

And they do pretty well. And then they keep doing it now. I mean, Xanax, fake Xanax, fake P fake percocet fake tylenol even fake illegal drugs like ecstasy and stuff like that because the supplies of fentanyl down there are so huge they have to look for new products for which to administer them so it's interesting so so that's really it it's it's it obviously it's insidious across the, but the reason fentanyl is in everything is because there's so much fentanyl. Yes.

It's not possible. If they had limited fentanyl, it was more expensive. They would not be just sprinkling salt on food. Right. Because I couldn't quite figure out why are these people buying blow with fentanyl in it? What is to be gained from the dealer in doing that? Because you get a fentanyl addict and in exchange

For a occasional cus cocaine customer. Yeah buying from you like once twice a week the same Oh, it's the old first time is always free thing It's a it was something like that and then after you after you've you've been you've survived your fentanyl exposure And now you're gradually getting addicted now. It's every day and that's the thing about fentanyl. It's a magnificent anesthetic because it takes you in and out of anesthesia very quickly. But that's what makes it a torment for users because you have to be using several times a day, fentanyl several times a day, because it doesn't last long. It doesn't keep the withdrawal sickness at bay for more than a few hours you're never in

peace on that's why this is as i said in the book this is all about supply creating demand nobody's even the most hardened heroin addict would never want fentanyl instead of heroin fentanyl you have to shoot up several times use in what whatever form several times a day with heroin it's you know you can get away most people can get away for two maybe several times a day. With heroin, you can get away, most people can get away for two, maybe three times a day. If they're strung out. Yeah. But it's always, you never get that peace and away from the withdrawals for very long.

It's always right there because of the nature of the drug. always right there because of the nature of the drug. So that's sort of the guts of the problem is that that compulsion is so hungry and so dangerous. And they began to understand that in Mexico, that this was also the most addicting and the most, you know, the withdrawals, as it turns out, are the worst. So between that, that compulsion, that need for the fentanyl, and then the sort of surrendering to a complete detachment from reality with the meth. Right. I mean, that problem and the death, it's like, it seems insurmountable.

You know, I know that at times it has felt that way to me. First of all, I think one of the things we need to recognize, and we are reluctant sometimes in this country to talk about the culpability of other countries, but I do believe that there is nothing normal about what's happening right now. This is all because Mexico has really done nothing to staunch this problem, to pay attention to this problem. Yeah, because you're clear in the book that, like, you know,

if you take it away, people have to adapt. And also, the traffickers have really painted themselves into a corner. As much as they're making now and as powerful as they seem, they still now are reliant for these massive profits. They are still now reliant on about i would say 10 to 15 shipping ports first of all the ports on the pacific coast um and where there are several but there's two principal ones about two to two hour two days drive south of arizona and then um also some of the airports so really they are allowing

you they're saying if you want to you could shut this entire thing down very easily. You don't have a huge manpower looking for fields of poppies all over northern Mexico, which is just so vast. You just have to focus on these areas. But because they haven't, you see these bizarre results. So in Culiacan, Sinaloa. they haven't, you see these bizarre results. So in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Culiacan is the capital city of the state of Sinaloa, and it's quite an amazing town. It's been there many times.

It's a weird place. It's an agricultural hub. Sinaloa is really one of the main agricultural producers. So tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, stuff like that. Now what you have in Culiaca khan is you have dozens maybe hundreds of chemical brokers in kulea khan there's no reason there's not an industrial it's not an industrial town there's no reason to have a legitimate reason to have all these dust these chemical brokers dealing with foreign chemical shipments right they're there because of the

methamphetamine you know meth on the fentanyl. And then the fentanyl is also coming in through the airports, various ones. But what that means is that it would not be that hard with a sustained collaborative binational approach to this. It would not be that hard to really drop that supply down. And to me, the supply is the story. This is what I've come to understand. I used to think before I'd really started studying the stuff that, well, this is all about demand.

Look, the opioid epidemic starts because pharmaceutical companies and convinced doctors to prescribe these pills like they're going out of style. And pretty soon you have an unprecedented amount of opioids nationwide. Yeah. Supply. Right. Provided by the drug companies and then doctors convinced to do this. But the same thing is true now. You see, you know, the drug supply has just shifted. It's just now out of Culiacan. It's out of various times, Nayarit, Michoacan, places like that.

And you have all this stuff, but it's still a supply story. And it's supply creating demand. And so I would say in one of the major ways that kind of you're asking earlier this aha moment or something, is when I began to understand that this was not about demand. Yeah. Not really about demand. Now, there's issues connected to our own isolation, connected to our own trauma, connected to our own massive marketing of other legally- And the pathways that have been put in place by creating needs of all kinds. Precisely.

And you've got all this stuff that makes us maybe especially vulnerable. I think community isolation is really a big one. Yeah. And that makes us especially vulnerable as a culture. But to me, it's really still about the supply. And I would say that there's actually a lot that can be done. That's why I focused on the book. We've been talking about methamphetamine, but most of the book is really about these stories of these people who are doing in smallest, smallest, unnoticed, unsexy ways trying to help a community stick together or, you know, rebound or help one person. Yeah, they're all great stories. All of this stuff is to me, that was to me the heart and soul of the book because it got to where I think as a culture and as a country, we need to go. We need to be about finding those ways of moving away from the idea, first of all, that we can all be alone in our houses and on our screens. And also we need to move away from the idea that there is this one big magic bullet answer to all our problems, like with pain pills for all American pain, that kind of stuff.

That stuff is so damaging. And so I wanted to tell stories of people whose the lesson of their stories is really people are showing up daily. They're just doing it. They're not waiting to be applauded, nor do they think they're saving the world in some noble, virtuous sense. You know what I mean? All of this is really kind of part of where I think my best take, I guess you might say, is where do we go? This is where we go. And I wanted to tell stories of those people that nobody knew.

Right. And they all have unique experiences, some of them criminal, mostly addicted, that have kind of come through the other side and focus on different methods of service. Like in Dreamland, you talk about the new drug courts. You talk about that here, too. You also talk about uh you know community stepping up but i i think that the interesting thing is like because i'm hearing people i'm hearing comics you know just blatantly and shamelessly you know make fun of the type of homelessness that's happening now because there is you know something zombie like and weird but you know they don't know what that is they or they could just say it's like drugs or whatever a mental illness but it bothers me yes always

uh to the set in the sense that like you know but you know talking to you what i tap into is that is that there that no one can no one wants to apply the sensitivity that empathy requires anymore they they just sort of like it ain't me it's not my problem and and then on the other side of that, when you talk about these addicts who have committed, sometimes consciously, to living in an alternative reality because the real one is too difficult, that they're also doubling down and that there is no bottom anymore. So there's the idea of recovery. Well, bottom is death. That's right. I thought that was a good observation in the book that used to be like, you know, that people in those lives would get to a point where they've had enough because, you know, they remember what real life is. But that doesn't exist anymore.

And what you find now in a lot of the encampments, as I said, is that people are freezing to death. Right. Rather than being, when they're offered housing, warming, shelter, something, they're free or they're getting frostbite. Why? Because they will not leave the dope. Now, they like to present it as, well, I don't want to leave my friends and the community

that I have. And I'm like, eh. These are people who are going to rip you off. You know they're going to rip you off at any moment. The way you talk about the prostitution and the pimping and the dependency that happens in fucking tents. Like, you know, what kinditution and the pimping and the dependency that happens in fucking tents. Like, you know, what kind of person is going to get a blowjob in a fucking homeless tent? Yeah.

But, look. Figure it out. I mean, I think this is the, I've been spending a lot of time on Skid Row lately. And, of course, Skid Row is where all of this starts. That's the amazing thing. That's an amazing understanding that I probably would have put in a book had i known better about skid row but this this form of homelessness you remember i don't know you probably remember in the 80s and 90s early 2000s a homeless guy was a shopping cart and a box yes right exactly and then there were these court cases that allowed first uh the city of los angeles ended up fighting but then settled all these court cases and allowed first the city of Los Angeles ended up fighting, but then settled

all these court cases and creating what we have now on the streets, which is first they settled with a lawsuit saying you can't enforce, you can have laws on the book governing sitting, lying, and sleeping on the street, but you can't enforce them between these hours. And then it was, the next suit was a few years later was now police can't seize personal property like backpacks and small stuff and then it became and i think this was crucial police can't seize bulky property so chairs and and tables and beds and all this kind of stuff and pretty soon you know this went all the way to the ninth circuit and everybody began to but the idea was it was progressive policy around a housing shortage or a housing crisis. The idea was that housing is the cause of homelessness.

Yes. And there may have been a time when that might have been true. The problem is those policies are then superseded or surpassed or undermined or whatever by the drugs on the street change. And that's the story of this book. Basically, it's within the last eight to ten years that we have seen first meth and then fentanyl just take over the entire country. And now you get to a point where people are not willing to leave the encampments. They're there because they know that they don't have to. They're not going to be moved.

They're not going to be, you know, and cops are going to be like, okay, I can't do anything. And so they stay with the dope. It's the dope, in my opinion, I have to say, I know there's this feeling like, well, these are their homes. This is community. My feeling is honestly that every time you talk to a person, a person in the middle of winter,

would you like to get housed? No, no, no, no, I want to stay here. That is so clearly the dope talking, that there is no free will here. There's no rational choice. People are choosing to live in both filth and complete violence and exploitation and risk death literally almost every single day. Homelessness is extraordinarily complicated. I understand that. A lot of people, you could be molested, domestic violence, emancipated from foster care, get out of prison, a rent hike, an eviction, a surgery.

All these things can make you homeless. And so can drug addiction in a very, very important way. But the other thing that happens though, is even once you're on the street, no matter the reason, it's also very true. I think that these drugs, and I would say methamphetamine does an especially good job of this, keeps you homeless. You're so strung out, you're so lost, you're talking gibberish that there's no chance of you making any sense or making an irrational decision. And at the same time, we don't have the power, police power to say, okay, we're going to take you, put you somewhere else for six months. Try out.

Yeah. We have like three yeah mental illness hold and that's that's about it and that's all thinking that needs to evolve but the idea that took hold at the same time as these policies and and and and then at the same time as the meth and then the fentanyl were spreading all across the country was all that housing is the problem of homelessness and that all people need is a house, which I think has shown itself to be absolutely insane. Take a person off of the street, that's the idea.

Put them in a house with services, with a case manager and all that kind of stuff. And that person, no matter the state of mind of that person, that person will be better off and fine. What ends up happening is of course they can't handle it they don't like it they begin to tear the place apart that's where you're finding in la i think a lot of landlords will not rent to because they bring the street into the house and they and they frequently just shred the house you know because they're not prepared it's not an idea that you can just go from the street to a perfectly nice house and have the mental wherewithal to and preparedness and to stop the drugs you got to stop the drugs

exactly and that's i mean that's the point of the last chapters of the book and and also the story yeah i never knew about the backpackers about you know that there's that one story about how he was observing you know how somebody went with they had their stuff that they left the house with, and then one suitcase went, and then the next suitcase went, and then just the backpack. But this backpack culture and this bicycle culture. Because on the street, nobody's really your friend. There is no real, I mean, there might be some, but by and large, it's a dog-eat-dog thing.

The crime that's committed in Skid Row is homeless against homeless. And as you say, in that one story in clerksburg uh west virginia small town yeah meth comes in no homeless people yeah and then meth comes in and boom it's all over you know right well that that was the one story of of a community coming together that i thought was great and then you go back to the original place of dreamland yes you know that is shifting and like in the way you describe it in the book with with what's going on there in terms of creating outlets and service and and and places where people can dry out and get trained for jobs and then you know uh recovering people creating jobs yeah you make it sound like it's big and it's really happening is it big

look it's no i don't think it's big but i think that's the point i think it's small and it's really happening. Is it big and really happening? Look, no, I don't think it's big, but I think that's the point. I think it's small. And to me, this is how we work our way out of this, in the very local, small ways, community connections, certain personalities meeting up. And from there, you find a scene. I was very big into the punk rock scene back in the late 70s, early 80s. And what you found is lots and lots of people coming together, same interests, lots of clubs starting up, all that kind of stuff.

You found these synergies of people. Right. And I think that is just such a beautiful thing. It doesn't mean that it's magically solved or it's going to take tomorrow, next year, we'll be fine. I think you characterize that well, is that there are people that keep trying and they fall off and they come back. I mean, that's the nature of recovery in a lot of ways. And I think it's absolutely, that town is very much like a recovering addict. It's like not just sitting around going, oh, woe is us,

saying, no, I'm going to try and I'm going to fall and I'm going to keep going. And it's going to take a lot of little people, no big factories coming in with 500 jobs. Those are all being robot jobs anyway. It's like small businesses. And also it's getting state governments and local governments to take the risk, allow it to happen, support it. And then when you have radicalized sort of Christian government taking over, you really wonder what a government system that would make abortion illegal, are they just going to start shooting these guys?

I don't. No, I doubt it. I think that these are, here's the thing. the street level and the connectivity, connection level in Portsmouth, Ohio, the town we're talking about right now, you begin to see how it's all bullshit, all that stuff's bullshit. No, this is about people just finding each other, coming together, having ideas. One guy's idea sparks an idea, and another person, she has an idea, her idea sparks, you know, it's that kind of synergy that begins to happen.

And also finding people spiritual. A lot of it is sort of reliant on spiritual community and church community and that kind of missionary outreach. And that's why I called. It's weird because I'm not a Christian, but that's why I called it The Least of Us. I began to read the Bible. I had read the Bible, but I began to read again the Bible, the Gospels in particular, and I came upon the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus, understanding the profound truths, this guy says, that which you do for the least of these, my brethren, you do for me.

He understands that without each other, we are lost. Without that community thing, we have needed that to survive as a species since the caveman days. And he understands that we without each other we are lost without that community thing we have needed that to survive as a species since the caveman yeah days and he understands that and so i began to play around with those ideas the least this this idea that that we're only as strong as the most vulnerable in our communities we're only we all of us have the brain chemistry to be that addict eating we all have the least of us within us yeah you know yeah and and so to me that addict eating. We all have the least of us within us. Yeah. And so to me, that became the way of conceiving of the book. Again, the book talks a lot about fentanyl and methamphetamine, but to my mind, the real heart of it is these ideas of Americans. We've been away from this idea for so long of coming together,

finding community because, you know, it's tough. It's sloppy. It's messy. You don't like other people. You got to pay more on taxes, maybe. Tolerance. I'm sorry? You have to have tolerance and patience. Indeed. And you have to be willing to just kind of work through the hard, the bullshit with some people because let's face it, but that's there. But I mean, in the long run, I think that's where you find the defense that's where you find the bulwarks that's where you find the communities moving forward and i was i went back to portsmouth because at the end of dreamland i glimpsed some faintest little glimmer of recovery

and i wrote 30 pages on on it in the last book in the dreamland book yeah and this time i go okay i want to see this in action so So I begin calling people there. And they say, well, you know what we're doing? They were very, they're saying, tell me a lot of things. It was very interesting to listen to. But then they said, you know, one of the things we're doing is we're setting up, it was right around Christmas, we're setting up a temporary ice skating rink that people can then come together and skate.

Yeah. And the truth is, this is an area that probably at one time knew how to skate. But the decline of the city, the decline of economics, the city used to spray water on this park and freeze in the winter and everyone would skate. But now nobody knows how to skate anymore because that was the city government when they actually had jobs and lots of people. So you're seeing all these people kind of flop around. But it's beautiful.

Everyone's loving it. The kids are loving it. They made a rink? Yes. They put together an entire rink in a vacant lot. And I went there and I was like, this is what I'm fucking talking about, man. This small stuff. Is it saving the world?

Of course not. Of course not. That's the point, though. It's this small thing where you're showing people, hey hey man, this is how you move forward on this stuff. And don't expect a miracle. Don't expect that you're saving the world. Don't expect that you will have sublime human connections of the kind that you cannot find on Twitter. Right on. Well, great book. Thank you, Mark. Really, once again, I appreciate your interest in my work, man. Yeah. So nice of you. Nice to see you.

You too. Okay. Take it in. It's heavy, but it's real. The Least of Us is available wherever you get books, and you can get it in paperback starting November 1st, and you can go listen to that earlier episode with Sam. If you have never heard it before, it's amazing. It's available to all listeners in the free feed right now,

episode 757. And if you could just hang out for a second. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Gold tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too.

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Okay, let's take it out. ¶¶ ¶¶ © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon... Thank you. guitar solo © transcript Emily Beynon Boomer lives. Monkey. Lafonda. Cattains everywhere. Stay away from that fentanyl. Stay away from that fentanyl. Stay away from that meth.

Stay sane. Use whatever options you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others. Thank you.